Chak de mallu laundiya!

Hee hee..i was reading this article on how men from haryana are marrying malyalee girls because they cant find any brides!

Serves them right…they indulged in foeticide n sex tests n now they have no women for their sons…

The best part is we mal (esp nair) r matriarchal (yes the women get the family property n gold)…that is y women still have *some* power in the society in Kerala…we r quite empowered as compared to other indian societies..

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Publication: Times Of India Bangalore;

Date: Aug 26, 2007;

Section: Deep Focus;

Page: 18

JATgrooms seek brides from Kerala The severely skewed sex ratio in Haryana is forcing young men there to go bride-hunting as far as Kerala. And the burden of adjusting to the cultural differences falls squarely on the women. Sunday Times checks out the implications of these far-flung unions Neelam Raaj | TNN

Shere are grooms aplenty but the brides are running out in Haryana So much so that last month, 33-year old Rambir, a local of Sorkhi village in Hissar, had to travel to faraway Kerala to find himself a match Tired of bachelorhood and determined not to share the same fate as his four unmarried brothers, Rambir decided to tread the path his neighbour Sadhu had a few years ago and get himself a Malayalee bride. From Hissar in Haryana to Kannur in Kerala may be a 3,000 km-long journey but for Jat bachelors, it’s the only way to change their single status.

For, decades of sex determination tests fol lowed by female foeticide are finally catching up with Haryana. A patrilineal society, where a groom’s parents have always put a premium on a bahu from the right family and the right caste, is being forced to reinterpret traditional notions of marriage.

‘‘Now, there’s no question of asking for dowry or being choosy about caste. We are hap py so long as a daughter-in-law comes into the house,’’ say Rambir’s parents, who failed in their efforts to find their son a partner locally. Their prayers were answered in Kerala, which boasts of a sex ratio of 1,058 females to 1,000 males as compared to 861 in Haryana.

After seeing a photograph of a girl that Anita — their neighbour’s Malayalee wife — gave them, Rambir and his family set off. ALL FOR A BRIDE

So common have these marriages become in Kannur that locals have dubbed them Haryana kalyanams (Haryana marriages) on the lines of Arabi kalyanams that were the norm some years ago. Such nuptials are usually quick — with neither family understanding the language of the other — and low-cost. The groom’s family pays for the train travel and the cost of the mar riage, with another Rs 20,000-40,000 thrown in for the go-between — usually a Malayalee her self married to a Haryanvi.

‘‘The marriages are mainly happening in Kannur district. The areas surrounding Payan nur, like Ramanthali, Kunhimangalam Kanayi, Velloor and Kandoth, have witnessed many such unions,’’ says G D Nair, Payannur municipal chairman. On the reasons for the phenomenon, Nair says it’s mainly because the girls’ families are very poor. That coupled with dowry demands — which takes the form of gold jewellery in Kerala — is what prompts mothers like 53-year-old Usha to say yes to Jat boys for their daughters. ‘‘My husband can’ work any more and we survive on a meagre pension. No proposals were coming and our daughter was already becoming overage. Then the family in Haryana into which my sister had married off her daughter suggested a match from their village. No dowry was in volved, so we said yes,’’ says Usha.

No one’s sure who started the trend and when — locals in Hansi ascribe it to a Malay alee nurse who married a patient and went on to find matches for other Jat youths — but there’s no doubting the fact that it’s become a regular ritual. ‘‘As many as 100 Jat youths have tied the knot with Kerala girls,’’ says social sci entist G Vishwanathan, who travelled to Hissar in order to study the phenomenon. Most of the brides are on the wrong side of 30, belong to poor backward Thiyya families and are edu cated. Their farmer husbands, in contrast don’t have much education but own small landholdings. They also speak a different language, eat rotis instead of rice and live in a male-dominated society where a woman has to produce sons if she is to get any respect at all. CUITURE SHOCK

These are differences that Sreeja who got married to Bhirbal Singh of Sorkhi two years ago, is still com ing to terms with. Attired in a blue salwar suit, dupatta over her head and speaking fluent Haryanvi with her mother-in-law, there’s little to betray Sreeja’s roots except for her dusky complexion and the Ker ala-style mangalsutra. She’s even learnt to tend cattle and make ro tis, but the scorching heat of a Haryana summer and the in cessant power cuts make her long for the raindrenched green countryside where she grew up. ‘‘It’s tough to adjust because everything is so

different here. I can’t even pop into my neigh bour’s house without telling my mother-in-law Back home, there were no such restrictions,’ says Sreeja, fanning her daughter to give her some relief from the heat. But is being the mother of a girl easy in a culture with such a marked son preference? ‘‘When she was born in Payannur, all the relatives and neighbours came with gifts. Here, they gave her nothing because she is a girl.’’ Like other brides from Kerala, Sreeja laid down two conditions be fore her marriage: that Bhirbal build her a toilet so that she wouldn’t have to go to the field and that her delivery be in Kerala.

Now, back in Sorkhi with her little one Sreeja has busied herself arranging alliances for other unmarried youths. ‘‘I have been the go-between for six marriages. Like me, the girls think this is the only way out of pover ty. They have no idea what it is like here,’’ she says, with a tinge of bitterness.

Just a few houses down lives Omana, an other Payannur girl whose marriage to 33-year old Ajit Singh in April was facilitated by Sree ja. Married just a few months ago, Omana — who was an anganwadi teacher in her village — speaks only a few words of Haryanvi and makes heavy weather of chappatis. The cell phone is her only connect with the world she’ left behind. ‘‘It’s an alien world for these girls and the first few years of marriage can prove to be tough,’’ says Ravinder Kaur, an IIT Del hi researcher who came across more than 40 cases of across-region marriages in a survey of five districts of Haryana. SON SYNDROME

The trend of long-distance marriages has only accelerated in the last three to four years, she says. A skewed sex ratio has made bride starved Haryana look to Bihar, West Bengal Jharkhand, Assam and now even Kerala, but the shortage still hasn’t changed the way this society views girls. ‘‘The attitude is ‘let the neighbours have girls, I will have a boy’,’’ says Dr Rekha Mishra, medical officer with the Haryana government whose efforts led to the country’s first-ever conviction in a sex deter

mination case.

Haryana’s infamous skewed sex ratio isn’t just about numbers, though they’re quite horrific — 820 girls for 1,000 boys is the child sex ratio as per the 2001 census — it’s about attitudes. In fact, when mobile ultrasound units started touring rural Haryana in the late 1980s, their advertising pitch was, appallingly, ‘Pay Rs 500 now and save 50,000 later’.

Since then, rising prosperity has only made sex selection more affordable, translating into a dearth of brides. The statistics speak for themselves: 36.24% of men between 15 and 44 years of age (the so-called reproductive or marriageable age) were tabulated as being unmarried in the 1991 census. In some districts like Rohtak, the percentage was as high as 44. Since then, the number has only gone up.

Whatever its other impact, this surfeit of bachelors is certainly keeping the matchmakers busy. No dowry, no horoscopes… just a sex ratio to match.

Inputs from Ananthakrishnan G in Kannur

neelam.raaj@timesgroup.com Sreeja, married to Bhirbal Singh of Sorkhi, has now turned a matchmaker

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11 Responses to “Chak de mallu laundiya!”

Now, this is a serious issue, so I’ll leave out my great sense of humor, so all my fans, please don’t cry, another day, another time, trust me.

Ok, now if their view on society is that short minded, and women are discriminated againt in Hariana to this day, what are the Malayalee parents doing in marrying off their daughters to such a place? If life for women there is so bad, aren’t they sending their daughters into danger?

And whats with the stupid people in Hairiana and the discrimation against women? So if its a baby girl, they kill it? So in essence because of their stupidity, and because now they go all over India looking for brides, all other Indian men would have to deal with a decrease in their bride pool?

And if they have so much problems now, why don’t they do away with the dowry system there? Make it illegal to exchange money as a prime factor in marriage. Obviously something needs to be done, because if this keeps going, its going to affect India as a whole.

Its sad but karma’s catching up with them. Unfortunately its these poor girls are surely going to repent. Haryana has the rudest people on earth. Satyam! Gurgaon isn’t really Haryana but i’ve met people jats who are rude to even themselves! On a lighter note, 1058 females in malludom! Hope just got a massive redose 😀

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